Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Roy Morris Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2010

In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before.

It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war.

A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun.

With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away.

With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

His 1872 Roughing It was Mark Twain's sanitized version of his trip west between 1861 and 1866, and Morris (Fraud of the Century) utilizes contemporaneous letters and diaries to separate fact from fiction about a watershed odyssey that transformed an itinerant printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, and Confederate guerrilla into journalist, author, and stage performer. Unsuited to soldiering, fun-loving 25-year-old Samuel Clemens accompanied his older brother Orion cross-country by stagecoach from Missouri to Orion's patronage appointment in the newly created Nevada Territory. Clemens's encounters included notorious gunfighter Jack Slade, with whom he shared an innocuous cup of coffee, and the indomitable polygamist Mormon leader Brigham Young, whom he found kindly and dignified. At a lively Nevada newspaper, Clemens launched his professional writing career and took the name Mark Twain; at a San Francisco paper, he honed his satirical skills and began a complicated friendship with writer Bret Harte; in 1866, he wrote the first modern description of Hawaiian surfing in a Sacramento paper. This latest Twain bicentennial volume is a tale of a high-spirited, gifted humorist finding his voice in the rough-and-tumble of the Wild West—an authoritative and engrossing slice of American history. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In Lighting Out, Morris recounts how an aimless Sam Clemens—weary of futile maneuvers with inept Confederate guerrillas—gladly accepts an invitation from his brother to accompany him to the Wild West. Though soon disabused of his dreams of striking it rich with a mining pick, Clemens discovers a different fortune with a journalist’s pen. Readers follow Clemens as he alternately amuses and enrages his readers with the barbed humor that becomes his trademark. Morris carefully investigates just how that humor first appears under the byline of one “Mark Twain,” concluding that Twain’s own explanation of his nom de plume—just like his extended frontier memoirs in Roughing It—is artistically brilliant but factually unreliable. Readers will appreciate the way Morris exposes Twain’s “stretchers” without deflating his irrepressible humor. --Bryce Christensen

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (March 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416598669
• ISBN-13: 978-1416598664
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,187 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Travels Of a Begining Genius, March 12, 2010

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain (Hardcover)

Travels Of a Begining Genius
Genius is to a large degree inexplicable. We can't explain what makes a Mozart or a Monet. We can try to figure out early life experiences, and make them fit and seem to predict future greatness. The exercise might not explain everything, but it might explain some things, and it certainly could help understand the person who is the genius, even if it doesn't go far to explaining genius itself. That is the role played by _Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain_ (Simon and Schuster) by Roy Morris, Jr. That Mark Twain was an American genius is inarguable; but his early adult life was full of caprice and of coincidence, and he might have wound up just another miner, or just another reporter, or he might have wound up dead (for he did take his chances). Twain did wind up a brilliant writer and stage performer, and did so because of specific experiences he went through, experiences peculiar to himself and quite different from anything anyone else was doing. Morris reviews the years starting when the 25-year-old Clemens went west in 1861 until he returned east in 1867, and often through the quoted words of Twain himself we get an insightful and often rollicking portrait of the picaresque beginnings of an author of genius.

Clemens's career as a riverboat pilot was interrupted by the Civil War. He was almost drafted as a pilot by the Union, which drove him to the Confederacy. He was to write about his war service twenty years later in "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," which Morris accurately describes as "a vision of the war's early days as a skylarking misadventure." With two weeks of so-called military service behind him, he withdrew back to home. His brother Orion was rewarded for his abolitionist stance with a patronage appointment within the newly created Nevada Territory, and Twain joined Orion for a stagecoach trip west. His trip was to provide the material for _Roughing It_. Morris gives a brief history of the stagecoach system, and describes the difficulties of life on the road. He was able to write hilariously later about the polygamy he saw in Salt Lake City, and his unexalted view of the Indians allowed him thirty years later to write the hilarious essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," in which he charged, "The poetic Indian - the Indian of Cooper and Longfellow - is only visible to the poet's eye." He failed as a silver miner. Returning dispirited to his cabin one day, he found a letter from the business manager of the Virginia City _Territorial Enterprise_, to which Clemens had been sending humorous letters. It was an offer of a $25 a week job as staff writer. Clemens learned that reporting the facts was just part of what a newspaper did, and that coloring the facts, or making them up, was part of the job, too. He was good at making things up, and caused such an uproar that he left for San Francisco shortly afterwards. He did eventually move on to a paper that accepted his satirical pieces, but feeling confined again, he lit out with pals for the mining camp of Jackass Hill.

Jackass Hill was in Calaveras County, and yes, it was here that he heard a former riverboat pilot tell the story about a frog filled with buckshot. The teller "was a dull person... he was entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him were austere facts... he saw no humor in the tale." Twain knew that if he could write the story in that fashion, "that frog will jump around the world." Another pal told the story of the "Royal Nonesuch," a rascal that did a naughty turn on stage; and a version of the Nonesuch (which Twain ruefully had to clean up) appeared in _Huckleberry Finn_. When "The Jumping Frog" showed up in print, it indeed went around the world, and was a big step towards Twain's realization that with all the shortened careers he had crammed into his life until then, what he should be doing was writing and making people laugh. He was to take a trip to Hawaii, and to have a journalistic scoop there when a lifeboat from the doomed clipper _Hornet_ arrived after 43 days, but he was not to be a regular newspaperman again. Returning to San Francisco, he took to the stage to tell about Hawaii, and he delighted audiences, making comic performance a second career after humorous writing. "He had come west as Sam Clemens," writes Morris, "out-of-work riverboat pilot and (technically, at least) Confederate Army deserter. He was returning east as Mark Twain - increasingly renowned journalist, lecturer, and short story writer." Morris's book is enormous fun because of its fascinating subject, and it can make us all thankful that after dozens of false starts, Samuel Clemens found the calling for which he will never be forgotten.
---

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, March 28, 2010

By 

Trevor Seigler (South Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain (Hardcover)

Samuel Clemens came west in 1861, a former steamboat pilot and would-be Confederate soldier with a hankering for money and a poison pen. He returned to the east in 1867 as Mark Twain, humorist par excellance and the leading light of post-war American literature. How that happened in the space of less than six years is the subject of "Lighting Out for the Territory," and it illuminates the important formative years of a budding literary genius.

Those familiar with Ron Powers's excellent "Mark Twain: A Life" will already know some of the events that shaped and influenced young Sam Clemens to flee the bloodbath of the encroaching Civil War and seek his fortune in the mines of the Nevada Territory, where he traveled alongside his politican brother. But for those who haven't read Powers's book, this serves as a volume all on its own about the important early years of Clemens/Twain's emergence on the national scene.

The book gives brief sketches from Clemens's early life (early death of his father and his beloved younger brother, his iteninerant work life before becoming pilot of a Mississippi riverboat, and his brief disasterous run as a Rebel guerilla in the early days of the War Between the States) and highlights the period from 1861, when Sam's brother Orion received an important government post in Nevada and took his brother along, to 1866, when Mark Twain came east to revel in the success of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County." In between, we find a budding literary superstar as he finds prospecting for gold far too hard (despite the illusorary success of the Comstock Lode, most Old West prospectors met with little to show for their efforts) and resorting to working for local newspapers less as a reporter and more as a teller of tall tales. Many of those stories that he wrote, outright hoaxes in which a family were supposedly massacred or funds for a war-relief charity were funneled to a society promoting sexual relations between the races, serve as the genesis of everything that made Mark Twain such a transcendant and controversial figure.

Twain's life took a turn for the better when he came to Virginia City and found more success with his pen than with his pan. Roy Morris, Jr. writes extensively about Twain's development alongside the rough and tumble co-workers of his newspaper, men who helped shape his literary voice and influenced his choice of presenting himself. Twain ran afoul of the polite society of Carson City (not the first time that he'd find himself on the "wrong" end of the public moos) and lights out for San Francisco, eventually sailing for Hawaii and recounting the harrowing experiences of a shipwrecked crew's voyage against all hope to the islands for rescue. Twain successfully turned his writings on Hawaii into his first stage show, where he learned the lessons of contemporaries like Artemus Ward to tell funny stories with a straight face and, in a sense, help give birth to American stand-up comedy.

The book ends in 1867, with Twain aboard another ship, this one headed for Europe and the Holy Land, where he encounters his future brother-in-law and learns about the woman who will be his wife from a photo the other man carries on him. We leave Twain right on the cusp of his international reknown, when he transcends the "regional humorist" tag and gives birth to American literature as we know it. How Twain got there, and the darkness that colored his white-suited last days, are for another time. But "Lighting Out for the Territory" illuminates the early days of a modern American giant, before he became such. In order to know where Mark Twain ended up, you have to know where he began, and this book does a good job of showing that.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The details that Twain / Clemens neglected to share with us himself, April 4, 2010

By 

Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain (Hardcover)

If you've read Mark Twain's book, "Roughing It," then you will be familiar with this slice of his life. Twain wrote about his western experiences in Nevada, California, and Hawaii within the pages of that 1872 memoir. But in his singular fashion, that narrative was undoubtedly "tweaked" a bit, with both omission and exaggeration used for greatest literary effect. Here author Roy Morris, Jr., unravels the threads to uncover The Rest of the Story.

He begins with the basics: "Samuel Clemens went west in 1861; Mark Twain returned east six years later. This is the story of what happened in between." (p.4) We gleefully join in on the journey to witness the transformation of a young riverboat pilot into a professional storyteller. Certainly the state of journalism at that time -- specifically the kind found in the 1860s American West -- contributes to the popularity of the fabricated report and the tall tale. As his fellow reporter Dan DeQuille tells him, "Get the facts first, then you can distort them as much as you like." It is in that fertile field where Clemens begins to develop his sense of word-craft. He not only absorbs it: he thrives upon it. In more than a few cases, it leads him right into trouble with reporters and editors and esteemed members of various communities. Yet all of his choices and paths eventually culminate in that magical night in San Francisco, where "The trouble starts at 8." Finally, success is his.

Morris employs a conversational approach to his topic as well; and it makes for a fun and informative read, with some laugh-out-loud moments. "Lighting Out for the Territory" is an interesting and amusing history that is recommended for a wide audience -- even for those who haven't read Mark Twain's account of it; and even for those folks who are not especially Mark Twain fans. Readers may nod in appreciation at the end and say, "Oh, OK, *now* it all makes sense."